When I was a little girl I did Daddy’s nails for a quarter. When I got older I did the job for free while we watched Bonanza, using an emery board and a nail clipper to bridge the gap between us. Our fingers were exactly the same, long and thin with weird, flat thumbs. I fiddled with his hands and he was content. O.C. was from that wretched phase of men who weren’t allowed to show their love, their sorrow, or their pain. They were very much allowed to be pissed off. He would look down at me from six feet tall, a towering, mysterious male smelling of dangerous sweat; his crinkly green eyes slightly curious. I would look back up at his contained rage and curiosity from my confused, pubescent female perspective, wondering what he thought of me and why did his temples pound so? Did I have anything to do with it? I never did doubt his love, even though he wasn’t able to warm me up with it like I secretly dreamed he would. Mom made sure I knew my daddy loved me but spared me from his all-too-human, foibled, frustrated, furrowed brow.
Daddy and I argued about black people and Vietnam. When I started having a left-wing mind of my own, he was stunned and appalled because he was an American all the way. He was a solid navy man whose ship got blown in half during World War II and who survived to proudly tell the harrowing tale. When I insisted on having a black, gay roommate, he threatened to disown me, his growly voice splintering with embedded prejudice. But Mom, to the eternal rescue, placated, cajoled, and explained, “This is a new generation, Oren, things have changed,” and when her soothing words didn’t work, she finally had to give him one of the three ultimatums of their married life—“Don’t ever ask me to choose between you and our daughter, because you would lose.” His temples stopped pumping with angry dad-blood soon after. We quarreled and clashed on a constant basis, but his mighty, whooping laugh, somehow full of hope, always reminded me that we had the same blood careening wildly within.
V
O. C. Miller smoked two packs a day way before the surgeon general made his nightmarish proclamation, and he continued to do so even after he started hacking great gobs of black goo from his lungs on a regular basis. After many endless coughing spells my mom finally convinced him to see a doctor. He dreaded the day and put it off because he feared “the Big C.” That’s what John Wayne called it before he withered up and rode off into the sunset for the last time.
I have always had a ghoulish fear of cancer myself. One lazy summer night when I was eight years old I had my head in Mom’s lap, sort of dozing while she and my auntie gabbed it up on the front porch. I didn’t have anything to do the next day but skate up and down Jamieson Avenue and change the diapers on my Tiny Tears doll, but what my beloved aunt blabbed to my mom changed that adorable innocence into an obsessive red fear that took years to get over. Aunt Edna was a janitor at a grade school, and that very afternoon an old man had scuttled into the playground with a shotgun, howling and groaning, and within minutes blew off the top of his head. If this wasn’t hideous enough to freak out the impressionable, imaginative eight-year-old, wait for what came next. “Edna, do you think Pam should hear this?” “Oh, Margaret, she’s sound asleep.” “She hears everything, Edna.” My aunt went on in a hushed tone that hardened the gruesome facts into stone. “The top of his head went sailing out into the yard and landed on the chain-link fence,” she whispered loudly, “brains were everywhere, and would you believe that a big buzzard flew down and landed on what was left of that poor man’s head?” My mom was appropriately shocked and asked why someone would do such a thing, and in front of the children, too. “Oh, before he shot himself he said he couldn’t live with the suffering anymore. He had brain cancer.”
The Big C.
I kept the noxious fear inside me until I couldn’t think about anything else, couldn’t sleep, read, play, or watch TV, much less blithely skate down the street or wipe a rubber butt. I saw that old man’s head sailing through the air with the greatest of ease over and over and over again; spinning like a wet red top in the blinding Valley sunshine. Mom thought I was getting the flu until I finally asked, tight and petrified, “Mama, what’s cancer?” She told me gently about the awful disease but reminded me that Aunt Edna exaggerated profoundly and told me to try not to think about it anymore. “Can children get it?” Can children get it? Can children get it? CAN CHILDREN GET IT?????
Twenty years later we waited for my dad’s tests to come back without saying the (big) “C” word, and all those grotesque fears floated through my mind like the ruined old guy’s head-top, but since I had delved into cosmic consciousness by then, I really worked hard at staving off that ancient, gleaming memory. So when the tests showed that he didn’t have the Big C but did have black lung disease, I had an irrational mixture of relief and rage that temporarily twisted my sanity.
O.C. took this meaty news in the same stride he took everything else, with stewing anger and hearty optimism. After smoking two packs a day for fifty years, he put the Marlboros down and never looked back. He had to quit working at Budweiser, since his breathing had become shallow and difficult, though this, of course, did not inhibit his imbibing. He considered drinking several beers a day a healthy practice because of the hops involved. Even after he quit Budweiser, he went to the side door every Friday and got his case of comfort at half price. The TV took on major importance: the trusty TV Guide his reading matter of choice. He pored through the classifieds, still on the search for an elusive magic bargain, haggling on the phone for hours with other “collectors” to take his mind off his hurting inhalations. He was forever strapped to an oxygen tank, his tragic lungs failing him more every day. He detested the bedpan, and the fact that my mom had to deal with it shook his manhood to the core. Even when he finally had to get that damned wheelchair, he made it to his card game puffing, panting, coughing, and hacking all the way. He still had a Cadillac, his only status symbol. We always had Cadillacs; never new, but long, sleek, and shiny just the same. Mom wheeled him to the Caddy, packed up the chair, and he grunted and groaned behind the wheel, driving ten miles an hour, determined to get down the street to Astro Aviation where Bruce Baker or Ed Eudie would meet him at the other end, unpack the chair, and wheel him into the far end of the factory where the chips flew and the ice cubes clinked.
On top of the daily grind, O.C. had a mysterious overnight personality change that made Mom’s life temporarily unbearable. All of a sudden, the goulash he had always relished became tasteless and dull, the game shows he usually enjoyed were full of stupid, ignorant sluts who never knew the correct answer, and a streak of unattended dust made him sputter with indignation. After enduring the onslaught for awhile, praying it would end, Mom started varying the scads of medication Daddy had to deal with every day, and found that a day without prednisone was a day with sunshine. The doctor switched the monster-making drug for another one, and Daddy snapped out of it, never knowing he had been a complete and utter boor.
When someone you love is really sick, there is a constant sorrow behind everything you do. Even when great things happened I would think, Wow! Isn’t this wonderful?! Oh yeah, except for the fact that my daddy can’t breathe. Still, he stayed around longer than the doctors expected, and a whole lot of his stay-around strength came from little Nick. He would sit on my dad’s hospital bed and watch him take apart a little motor or fix a dusty, old broken watch and laugh with glee like a miracle had happened. He called him Da, and for four years he had a grandpa.
Since my mom was used to the longtime routine and the gradual decline, she was so exhausted that the big picture eluded her. I knew my dad was about to face the final curtain before she did. Toward the end O.C. finally stopped drinking beer and playing poker. Coughing hard and constantly had taken precedence. There was no more mighty, hopeful laughter. His beautiful fingers had become twisted knots, and his color was way off because there was no oxygen getting inside where it counted. His lungs had become lumps of coal. The TV was on, but he wasn’t watching.
VI
Michael was in San Francisco with the newest band he had put
together, so Nicky and I decided to spend the night with Nana and Da. Good old Aunt Bert was visiting from Dayton, and I thought Nick should get to know her. It was the day after Thanksgiving and even though Daddy hadn’t eaten a whole lot, he seemed to really enjoy this extremely rich chestnut cream goop I had concocted the day before, and that’s all he wanted for dinner. I sat there with him, watching him struggle to eat, but he didn’t want any help. We never pretended he was about to run the triathalon, but he didn’t like us to dwell on the fact that he would never get out of bed again. I tried to squeeze in a little spiritual info as we chatted about the inconsequential nonsense that lightened his weighty load. “Let me know what’s going on over there, Daddy,” I would say. “When you see that bright light, be sure to follow it.” I told him I thought Mom Miller would probably be there to meet him with her sweet smile, but he said that when you die, it’s like turning off the TV; everything goes blank. I trembled to the core and pointed out passages in my spiritual books that tore that concept to shreds, but I think he was looking forward to the blankness. Too worn out to squabble with me about the hereafter, he had even conceded to all the aunties who had been trying to save his soul for several decades by accepting Christ as his savior on Thanksgiving Day. He did it for them, and I thought it was such a gallant gesture. They wept with relief and evangelical joy, but I knew Daddy was still totally confused. He kept the Bible by his bed, along with all the love-laden literature I had bombarded him with, but he really wasn’t a reading kind of guy. He had always lived his life with his hands, and they didn’t work anymore.
My old GTO friend, Sparkie, met me on Lankershim Boulevard for a spot of sushi, and I told her I thought my daddy was on his way out. She was a little horrified that I could tell her this so casually, but I didn’t feel casual at all. I was in touch with something beyond what the eye can see. O.C. had been sleeping so much he was probably halfway to where he was going already. This was an opinion I didn’t share with my aunties. They would have checked my forehead for a fever.
Science of Mind had brought my many varied and incoherent beliefs into a clearer focus. I truly believed that death was just another step in our vast and immeasurable journey and that it could actually be perceived as an adventure. I wish I could say that I conveyed some of this to my darling Daddy. I tried, but he was hurting so bad, suffering so hard, clinging to his mortal coil so desperately that my newfound faith trembled under the weight.
It was about nine o’clock when I got home from sushi with Sparkie and had a panicky urge to tell my dad what an inspiration he had been to me and how much I loved him. He nodded. “I know the first thing you’re going to do over there is take a big, huge deep breath,” I told him, and he smiled and closed his eyes. I asked if he wanted some of the chestnut goop, and he whispered, “That’s all right, baby, that’s all right.” It was the last thing he said.
Since Aunt Bert was in from Dayton, we set up a roll-away bed in the living room, where I was going to sleep, and I put Nicky down on the couch and read him a story. All was quiet in Daddy’s room, except for the wheezing of the oxygen tank. After Nick conked out, believe it or not, Mom, Aunt Bert, and I got into a quiet discussion about the pros and cons of lard. I saw no pros at all in the use of pig fat, whereas Aunt Bert had cooked with it her entire seventy-five years and with the exception of a stick-out tummy, she was fit as a squeaky old fiddle. Even though she was quite adamant about the many fine uses of lard, she spoke in hushed tones. Old folks seem to tiptoe around death, giving it a wide berth and a lot of respect, peeking at it between their fingers like it’s a real scary movie. If we’re quiet enough, maybe it’ll go away.
We had all gotten into nightgowns and jammies, and I wanted to check on Dad one more time before heading into a fitful dreamland. The sight of him took all my air out and made me feel invisible. He was curled up on his side, eyes rolled back into his head, bent hands clasped, gasping, wrenching final air into his failed lungs. The death rattle is real, and it stings the ear like a hive full of defiled bees. Instantly I thought of my sleepy mom, rubbing lanolin into her cheeks in the bathroom, Aunt Bert thumbing through Reader’s Digest, my little Nicky, who was losing his grandpa and didn’t know it, sleeping peacefully. I had an absurd, agonizing desire to do Daddy’s nails in front of the TV one more time, innocently watching Hoss Cartwright kick the butt of a bad guy, but pressing up against the wall, digging way inside myself, I grabbed ahold of my unbeaten, invincible spirit and pinched it, hard. Pushing myself to walk over to the bed, I took hold of his crumpled hand. “Daddy?” No response whatsoever. His lips were blue, his eyes seeing into another realm; ragged breath, rattling in and out, in and out.
With deep dread I had to call my mom in, and I guess the tone of my voice shook her up. She rushed in confused and fatally frightened, her eyes telling the thirty-seven-year-old story of courtship, love, marriage, betrayal, pain, heartache, acceptance, more love, understanding, profound compassion, and finality. When she saw Daddy she let out a scream I’ll never forget and fell on him—“Oren! Oren, no, don’t go yet…” Aunt Bert came running in, tears flying, her little lady’s voice chirping, cracking, calling to Jesus. Daddy never moved, just that loud, ragged breathing signaling his imminent exit from the physical plane. “He can’t go yet, Pamela,” my mom whimpered in a sore, unfamiliar voice. Daddy’s favorite sister, the talkative Aunt Edna, was called, and since she lived around the corner, here she came a few minutes later, being held up by Uncle Ronnie. Seeing her wild-tempered, beloved little brother with his eyes rolled back in darkness, hearing that god-awful sound demanding release, she let out a shriek and grabbed my mom, “Oh Lordy,” she wailed, taking in the whole sad situation, “he could be like this for a week!” At that point I came out of my shocked stupor, vowing he would have his release way before the night was over. Relief, respite, deep, never-ending inhalations, hopeful laughter waited on the other side, I knew it. My mom was being comforted by the family, so I took a seat across from Daddy, closed my eyes, and started speaking to his spirit, “It’s time to go, Daddy, it’s time to set yourself free, take a deep breath, let go, let go, let go, my darling, sweet daddy.” It was a precious litany from my soul to his, and after about thirty minutes, I realized his breaths were coming slower and slower, and even though I knew it was for his infinite good, when the final breath was pulled in and never let back out, I collapsed on the bed, curled into him, and felt the living warmth drain away. I stroked the back of his neck where soft gray hairs grew, I inhaled his Daddy scent over and over, until my face was soaked with tears. Mom and my aunts were on their knees, keening; I had never seen my mom entirely out of control before, which gave her a new, vulnerable dimension that made me cry even harder. Uncle Ronnie was the ultimate rock for them, for which I was truly grateful. After my daddy was gone, I kissed his cheek one last time and joined them in their sorrow, praying for O. C. Miller’s terrified soul on its gigantic, swooping journey.
VII
Daddy spoke to my mother the morning of the funeral. She was wandering in the backyard, too scattered and sorrowful to know what to wear, when she heard Daddy’s voice. “Put on that pretty blue suit that Pam bought you,” he said softly in her ear. Mom is very much a realist and certainly did not expect to hear from my dad, but feeling much better, she went right into the house and put on the blue suit. When she told me about it, my faith spiraled and I grinned into the gray skies.
Daddy was buried on a high hill far out in the San Fernando Valley. I was shaken up, so my oldest grade-school friend, Iva, drove us to the funeral. Iva is full of freckles, and my dad had always said to her, “Hey, Iva, have you been standing too close to that cow again?” Every time he said it he hollered with laughter like she hadn’t heard the dumb Southern expression two dozen times before. We reminisced about Daddy’s corny sense of humor all the way up the long green hill. I didn’t want to look at him in the casket, but Mom did, and I heard her cry, “Don’t let Pamela see him! He wouldn’t have wanted to look
like this!” She called out to me in a bedraggled, strained voice, “Pamela, don’t come in here, don’t.” Sitting out in the flat, empty foyer, I tried real hard not to conjure up any images. Michael held Mom close beside him, and I held her hand as we all straggled to the grave site, where Aunt Edna’s nice Christian preacher spoke gently of heaven and forgiveness. O.C.’s poker buddies brought a huge royal flush made out of flowers and stood grimly in a row like See, Speak, and Hear No Evil, looking like sad, uncomfortable, overgrown boys. Mom and I each placed a rose from the garden on the casket. Almost overly stalwart and straight-backed, I felt like I had to be shatterproof for my mom, who was finally letting all those years of wounded strength come tumbling down.
Daddy spoke to my mom a few more times, and even though it’s beyond amazing when she hears his lovable growly voice, we’re still waiting to find out what it’s like up, out, over there. She was in the backyard picking some white bell-shaped flowers to take to his grave site one morning, and he said, “You know I never liked those, why don’t you bring me a piece of my fig tree?” The old coot was still pretty ornery. The next time he came out of the great nowhere, Mom had been arguing with one of his sisters and it was about to drive her nuts. Pacing around in the backyard under his beloved fig tree, she asked him what she should do about it, hoping absently for a reply. “Fuck ‘em,” he announced in her ear, and it was really just what she needed to hear.
Take Another Little Piece of My Heart: A Groupie Grows Up Page 13